GLAM/Newsletter/April 2013/Contents/Spain report
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Longest edit-a-thon ever at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona
By35 hour edit-a-thon at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona
Fundació Miró’s Espai 13 is celebrating the 35th anniversary since its creation. Fundació Miró had already collaborated with Wikipedia back in 2011, when they hosted an edit-a-thon about the Catalan artist Joan Miró. But this time Amical Viquipèdia and Fundació Miró agreed to make a huge celebration to commemorate the event: 35 consecutive hours editing Wikipedia.
During that time, around fifty Art and Philosophy university students from all over the country, and around fifteen volunteer Wikipedians, gathered in the workplace to start or expand articles on 300 artists who have exhibited at Espai 13, Fundació Miró’s space dedicated to promoting young artists’ work. To start the event, we held a press conference at 12am on Friday, April 12th, 2013. The first shift of participants was already prepared to start working on the 300 proposed articles about the Espai 13 artists – and some of those artists were present at the event too, so the students were able to take freely licensed pictures of them and post them to Wikimedia Commons. The 26 Art and Philosphy students who participated in the first turn, plus the 5 volunteer Wikipedians who were there to help them, stayed until 10pm – that is, 10 hours. The second turn comprised a similar number of participants. They worked admirably during the whole night without rest until 10am next day, when the third shift took over and stayed until the end of the edit-a-thon eleven hours later, finishing at 9pm on April 13th, 2013. The students and the volunteer Wikipedians didn’t just write on Wikipedia – there were parallel activities scheduled in order to get out, relax the mind and get ready for more work on articles. In addition to lunch and dinner at the magnificient gardens of the museum, those activities included a guided visit to the museum at midnight, conferences by Wikipedians, a couple of performances from two of the artists that were being written about, and two yoga sessions –one of them being held at 6am in the morning at Fundació Miró’s balcony, when Barcelona was waking up and the sight was breathtaking.
Big data Week in Barcelona
Following the World Wide event Big Data Week, Amical co-organized the Barcelona edition with Media 140 and CatalunyaDades, two non-profits based in Barcelona. Big Data Week, BDW, is one of the most unique global platforms of interconnected community events focusing on the social, political, technological and commercial impacts of Big Data. It brings together a global community of data scientists, data technologies, data visualisers and data businesses spanning six major commercial, financial, social and technological sectors. The festival connected a number of global cities through locally hosted meetups, events, networking functions, data visualisation demo’s, debates, discussion and hackathons. Events were designed to provide a platform to educate, inform and inspire – organised by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about data. BDW is a self organising community where anyone is able to host and create an event during the festival; making the platform completely open and community driven. You can see our program here.
Wikipedia Workshop for historians at the History Museum of Catalonia
On April 8 Amical organized a Wikipedia & Wikimedia Commons workshop at the History Museum of Catalonia, where User:Galazan is Wikipedian in Residence. Almost 80% of the Museum staff attended the workshop and since then most of them are improving one article on Wikipedia, being guided and helped by the Wikipedian in Residence.
Wikipedia Workshop for heritage professionals at the University of Barcelona
On April 26 Amical Viquipèdia participated in a Mobile App & New technologies Seminar, where user:Kippelboy presented Wikipedia's mobile App, stats and future plans. Also talked about GLAM-wiki partnerships and how mobile affects them.